No I am not a footballer’s wife or girlfriend though the amount of sport my OH watches on TV I could be a football widow…..very soon!!

What I am referring to is a Woman Ageing Gracefully, and with all this current discussion on gender discrimination maybe I should say a PAG i.e. Person Ageing Gracefully! Seriously though is there a way to age gracefully? The dictionary definition of ‘gracefully’ is having or showing grace or elegance. So what is grace? Elegance of movement and polite respect?

Bette Calman aged 83 years

Let’s start with movement which is a sore point as one gets older. Apart from that amazing yoga woman who at 80 years old, or in her case young, can bend in every direction, the rest of us slowly and painfully wake up and then spend hours of time and money at yoga and pilates classes, osteopaths and chiropracters just to keep ourselves moving. Long gone are the days that I can stand on one leg and put the other into the leg of my knickers without using a steadying hand to stop me falling over – that is not a very graceful movement!

Liz Hodgkinson recently wrote an article about this subject in The Lady Magazine titled ‘I’m a WAG and proud of it’. However if I thought she was going to enlighten me with anything I didn’t already know then I was to be disappointed. Just reading her beauty regime in the article made me exhausted…..”I know for a fact that if I miss a single day of my early-morning class, I will descend into flab”. Apparently laying in bed in the morning is a luxury for her and she tells how her fellow sexagenarian, Anna Wintour, is out playing tennis at 5 a.m., probably in full make-up with not one hair of that famous bob out of place.

Regular eye-brow threading, waxing, teeth-whitening, manicures, pedicures, and it seems cosmetic surgery are a necessity to age gracefully. I am glad she can afford all of these procedures and has the pain threshold to cope with some of them, personally I have to take a paracetamol to have a bikini wax. Anyway is this ageing gracefully? I am focusing on keeping my body functioning and at the same time trying to embrace my ever-increasing wrinkles and not worry about them. We all want to look good but if it takes all that time and dedication I am just going to have to hope that my OH doesn’t notice and that my ability to make him laugh doesn’t fade with age!

Maggie Smith, a beauty in her youth, ageing gracefully

Jackie Stallone ageing not so gracefully!

We all have our icons in this WAG category and for me it is Helen Mirren. However another favourite of mine is Maggie Smith who may not have been practising the Liz Hodgkinson regime but is someone that makes us all laugh with just one lift of her un-Botoxed eyebrow and a line from her un-censored lips! Who would you rather spend time with Maggie Smith or a cosmetically enhanced lady such as Jackie Stallone?

I am definitely not a WAG but maybe a WEA (Woman Embracing Age) and my focus is going to continue to be on keeping all parts moving with regular Pilates classes, Nordic walking and lots of laughing along the way!

Just as a point of interest, when I put ‘women ageing gracefully’ into Google images there was a picture of George Clooney on the third row! Now there is a man I could age gracefully with and he might even inspire me to get up at 5 a.m. to exercise so that I could bend in every direction…..actually correction if GC was in the other half of the bed I wouldn’t want to leave it!